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The Best Apps for Teachers
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Transcript
The Best Apps for Teachers
Resource Package created by Mallory Hauer
I have compiled the resources I gained from a professional development event centered on the use of technology in education. These apps will help you organize your classrooms and resources, provide you with some cool new ideas for activities and help us all achieve our goal of creating a paperless classroom. Enjoy!
I found out about all these incredible apps at the 2013 BCAMTL professional development conference held in Burnaby, B.C. It was an amazing experience and I learned a lot! I am not a tech savvy in the slightest and this project definitely put me out of my comfort zone, but in the end I'm so glad I took a chance. I hope some of these apps will make your educator duties a little easier, and I encourage everyone to try and go paperless!
iMovie
$4.99
Test Producer
$9.99
Pages
Haiku Deck
$9.99
Free
Grade It!
This app is AMAZING!!!!! It’s only $4.99 but the opportunities are endless! If your school buys it for their iPads, the price goes down to 2.99! With this app, students can easily create short movies, video projects, music videos and much more! It’s ridiculously easy to use and incredibly intuitive – anyone can become a film editor with professional looking results. During my workshop, we made a wicked movie trailer in less than 15 minutes! This is a great way for students to personalize their learning experience and get creative with their education. In addition, there options to add special effects to your films such as musket fire and explosions! Cool!
Free
This is hands down the best video editing software on the market for students and education. There are several templates to choose from to create quick and easy projects as well as advanced options that rival the quality of Final Cut. By downloading this app, you transform your iPad into a mobile movie studio using video taken from your Camera Roll. Definitely worth the $4.99.
This app allows you to create tests and quizzes quickly and easily. The program is very intuitive - simply type in the questions and answers and the app generates the test for you. No more messing around with formatting problems. This app can format the information entered into several question options such as multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, question/answer and essay. You can even add images and photos! Then simply save your tests as PDFs and export to Dropbox or Copy to allow you access to them anywhere anytime.
This app is certainly well worth the $9.99 price tag as it affords teachers the option to create their tests and worksheets on the go (or even in bed!). This is the Word equivalent for macs, and the iPad version makes all this technology mobile. As an added bonus, you can save your creations in Dropbox or Copy as opposed to taking up space on your device. In addition, you can save your projects as .doc or as PDFs and email them to your colleagues or students.
This is a wonderful free app that creates easy breezy power-point-like presentations in a snap. This app is great for creating mini projects and reports - students can create a beautiful presentation in minutes! The steps are super simple: choose a template, choose your images, enter your text and voilà! A common issue when using power points is the fact that students usually need to use google to search for images which are often poor quality and violate copy-right laws. The best part about Haiku Deck is its massive database of quality high-definition images that are both beautiful and free to use without breaking any laws! Warning – younger students should be supervised as some of the images may be too mature.
Protuber
Haiku Deck also has tools for creating graphs and charts to add professional flair to your presentations. When you’re finished you can save the presentation to your private Haiku Deck account, email it to a friend or teacher, or upload it into a blog, on to Facebook or to a Twitter feed. Share the love!
Free
Simply enter your school’s existing letter grade scale and Grade it! will automatically tell you what marks correspond to what letter grade. For example, if your test is out of 18, this app will tell you what your students need to get to receive an A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, etc. This app is super easy to use, and will make your grading duties much easier.
Pick Me!
Cool and free! This app will calculate letter grades and percentages for any test or assignment! No, it does not do your grading for you, but how many times have you felt restricted to create tests and assignments out of ten, or twenty or fifty just to keep it even so you can figure out the letter grades? No more! You can now add those extra questions! Make your test/assignment out of what ever you want!
$1.99
Flip Board
Free
Another great app, Protuber allows you to create an account and save your favorite You Tube videos into organizable files which can be easily found later when you want to show the video. But perhaps the very best feature with Protuber is that it eliminates the bombardment of advertisements that accompany the beginning of so many You Tube videos these days. These advertisements can contain unpredictable and inappropriate content for students, so having this option is extremely beneficial and a lot less risky for teachers.
Quizlet
Free
Add your students names and pictures into this app and it will randomly pick which ones you call on during class. This app also ensures that everyone get called on at least once. In addition, it can be used to assign students into groups, rather than having to number heads or draw straws. Pick me! would work particularly well if your device was already hooked up to the projector so that students could see the slot-machine-like randomizer in action.
Teacher Kit
Free
Another awesome feature of Flip Board is that users can create their own magazines by collecting articles from here and there and compiling them into one personalized version to read later. Making their own magazines is an excellent assignment for students, and the best part is that they can then be shared with other users – a.k.a. the teacher and other students. Flip book is also a great research tool.
Flip Board seems to be all the rage right now amongst teachers. It collects news from around the world and varied sources based on your chosen interests. For instance, one could choose "art" and Flip Board would search the web to gather news and information on this subject in order to generate an updated “magazine” full of articles. You can have several interest categories at once and even add the news feeds from your Facebook and Twitter accounts so you are always current on the latest happenings, news, and trends – great for the information hungry!
Copy
Free
This is the Facebook of quizzes. Students and teachers can go on and create their own quizzes and digital flashcards or browse the tens of thousands of others that have already been created for each and every subject and topic imaginable. One of the best features of this app is its mobile version, which makes it super easy for students to quiz themselves using their smartphones anywhere anytime. It also has a great audio feature which is fantastic for pronunciation in language classes. Best of all, it’s free!
Keynote
$9.99
Copy is the answer to your storage problems. Unlike Dropbox, which provides you with only 2 GB of storage, Copy provides you with 15! No more lost usb sticks! Plus, instead of emailing physical attachments to your students, you can simply email the links (great if you're planning on sending large files). This is also an easy way to share entire files and folders with colleges and peers. You can also access and organize your files in the cloud from anywhere! Furthermore, in view of saving paper, students can email you their assignments and you can save them in Copy for easy and paperless grading.
Teacher Kit packs a powerful punch for a free app, providing a multitude of useful tools such as tracking student attendance and behavior, creating seating plans, creating and modifying grade books, and much more. Teacher Kit also has super cool face detection software that allows you to create a photo for each student in your class – simply take a picture of the whole class together and Teacher Kit will organize it into individual students! Great for learning names at the beginning of the year. You can add and organize multiple classes at once, add notes to lessons, calculate grades and percentages all from one app. I would definitely recommend that you give this one a whirl!
Another home run from apple! This app is fantastic for making simple quick, easy and beautiful presentations on the go. Create, format and animate then present and share all by touching and tapping. This is an extremely powerful presentation tool with tons of possibilities and customizable aspects. In cases where there is collaboration involved, this app also works with those who may be using Power Point. With easy to use tools, you can drop in photos and videos with just a touch!
Evernote
Free
Skitch
Free
iAnnotate
$9.99
This is great free app for annotating any image, adding instructions, arrows, circling, adding text bubbles, and more. Ever wanted to show a picture to the class but were afraid of some of the content? Skitch allows teachers to blur out sensitive material in any image. By taking screen shots you can also annotate websites – great for giving instructions, and even maps off of Google – great for giving directions.
Evernote is for the organized teacher. It allows you to take and organize notes wherever you are, even letting you set alerts in conjunction with specific notes. See something cool – record it in Evernote. I have a file under “cool teaching activities” and every time I observe a great lesson I make a note about it and add it to my collection. In addition, you can add images, voice notes, mp3s and websites to a note. Best of all, there is a search option to look for specific notes that you made in the past. You can also organize your notes into specific files.
This is a fantastic app for annotating documents (including highlighting, underlining, adding notes, book marking, creating PDFs, giving a signature, adding voice notes and icons such as arrows, smiley faces, attention, and check marks). This app would be an excellent step in moving towards a paperless class – students could email you their projects/essays and you could annotate and mark them right from your iPad before sending them back. This app is 9.99, however I was able to catch it while it was on sale for 4.99 – great deal!
Show Me
Free